As for Albania and Macedonia: look, this is more of the Jackson Pollock Population Problem that has plagued the place for years. Specifically, here, it's a problem arising from a "Macedonia" (or FYROM, as they say in diplo-speak--Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia--to keep from offending, of all people, the Greeks)--anyway, a "Macedonia" that is so weak in its own sense of self that its constitution refused to recognize as citizens anyone not "Macedonian," by which they meant "Albanians." Of course the Albanians who attacked Macedonia are thugs too. Here we apply the Rule We Use When We Can't Make Sense Out Of The Situation, Which Is Often In Yugoslavia: "Don't Kill Each Other, You're Annoying The Neighbors." As for who is in the right? I haven't a clue. And neither do you.
Jihadi, you mean like here:
The Truth About Rajmonda - A KLA Soldier Lies for the Cause
"For the past year, the CBC's Nancy Durham has been sending dispatches from a small Kosovar Albanian village.
So in June, when the NATO-led Kosovo Force - KFOR - opened Kosovo to the outside world Nancy headed straight for Shale to see how the people there had managed during the NATO bombardment. And for the first time, in 18 months of covering the war over Kosovo, she was able to move freely throughout the region.
As a result, Nancy uncovered much more than she expected. Here is the story in her own words.
I returned to Kosovo in June, three days after the arrival of NATO's Kosovo Force, KFOR. It was a thrilling time, and suspenseful too.
I had come to Shale, a village I haven't named until now. During the war I was asked not to. The people wanted to protect their Kosovo Liberation Army run hospital.
I returned to Shale not only to see who survived, and how they managed to, but also to learn more about one person in particular.
During the war here it was impossible to move freely and therefore difficult to get answers to all my questions.
I am looking for Rajmonda Rreci.
I met her for the first time, a year ago, in Shale's KLA hospital. I was told she was being treated for trauma, because she witnessed the killing of her sister, apparently by Serbs in an attack on her village.
"And maybe I will be a part of the Kosovo liberation army because that's the only way for us except if the world help us," she said at the time.
The next time I saw Rajmonda - last December - it was at the KLA's mountain headquarters in Drenica.
She was dressed for her new part, and vowing to die for Kosovo's independence.
"It's a Kalashnikov and it's just like one member of my family. this is for me everything," she told me.
Rajmonda's story was riveting. Everyone could understand her wish to avenge her sister's killing.
I asked her about my visiting Qendresa's grave.
"Even I don't know where it is+", she said. "It's hard, too hard. Really really hard."
When we parted that winter night, I had doubts about Rajmonda's ability to survive. Her Kalashnikov rifle was no match for the Yugoslav army. But I had underestimated Rajmonda.
In June, I found her still on the mountain. This 19-year-old girl had made it through war. She was staying at the KLA's logisitics house, and still a soldier, but on her day off. I stayed the night and Rajmonda talked me through the last months of war. She showed me how she spent her leisure time between battles.
"We sleep 12 girls, in this room, 60 in whole house," she said, "we sleep just like sardines.
I asked what she did in her leisure time, between battles. She unrolled a drawing of a girl on beach. "It's just like my dreams," she said. "We always dreamed to finish the war and then we can go to the beach and have a holiday far away from this place because we saw too much and everything."
Rajmonda seemed more like a child to me than a battle hardened soldier.
"When you see all those that we saw, all those massacres, all the people. When you see that they don't have enough to eat. All the burned houses [so] they stay only in the land, they don't have nothing. ..You don't have time to think that you killed a man or something else. You only want to kill, to kill him because you know what he done to your family. And for me all the people from Kosovo, not only for me but all people for Kosovo are our family."
"Do you think about your sister?" I asked. "I'm thinking about her but I told you I said one time you have to lose something that you love, you really love to have the freedom," she replied.
Rajmonda may have won her freedom but she still belonged to the KLA. She was both loyal soldier, and teenage girl and she had begun to open up a little. Rajmonda admitted she hid things from me; that she already was a member of the KLA when we first met. What else was there to this elusive girl?
The war was over, but Rajmonda was still an obedient soldier.
Last December I had wanted to go to Rajmonda's village to learn more about her. I wanted to gather all the details I could to understand a young girl who had lost her innocence so tragically. Rajmonda asked me not to go there. She said she was worried it might endanger her family if I visited them.
It seemed a reasonable request.
It was a very tense time.
But in June with the retreat of the Yugoslav army, it was at last safe for me to visit her home in Skenderaj.
I wasn't optimistic about finding anyone at home because Rajmonda had told me her family was now in Albania. But this wasn't true.
I found Rajmonda's mother, Barhije, at home along with two other daughters. Two year old Ilirida and, to my astonishment, Rajmonda's nine year old sister, Qendresa. The sister who was supposed to be dead.
I was shocked, but Rajmonda's mother offered a novel explanation. There was a murdered sister, she said, but Rajmonda got her name wrong. It was Dafina who died.
I spent an awkward hour. We looked at the family album. I saw Rajmonda as a toddler on a Montenegran beach holiday. There was no trace of Dafina. I had a sinking feeling. Perhaps there never was a Dafina. Perhaps there was no murdered sister at all. Had I been used for the cause?
Six weeks later, in August, I got my chance to find out. I returned to Kosovo to confront Rajmonda. I found her still near Shale but at another KLA base.
"Yeah, I lied to you," she said.
Rajmonda admits she lied about Qendresa, but claims it didn't start out as a lie. She said she was misinformed.
"In the beginning it was a mistake," she said, "because I spoke when I was not sure. I believed my sister was killed when I was not sure but I believe because we are in war and in war happen everything."
But why didn't Rajmonda put the record straight on my subsequent visits?
"I think about that and I said to myself. 'Why I have to tell her my sister is alive when there are so many girls and mothers who lost the childrens, the sisters, the family. They don't have the chance to give interview.'"
Rajmonda doesn't take all the credit for her strategy.
She claims the doctors at the field hospital encouraged her to lie.
Shpetim Robaj was one of those doctors. He was killed shortly after I met Rajmonda, when his Red Cross vehicle hit a landmine.
But Fitim Selimi, the KLA doctor who treated Rajmonda in September and then took me up the mountain to find her in winter, did survive the war. He appeared completely taken aback by the story, when I found him in Pristina in his new role as director of hospitals for all of Kosovo.
He insisted this was the first he knew of any lie.
"Maybe she thought the job she was doing was too little," he said. "So to show Kosovo she was doing much more she said she lost her sister and to show our suffering maybe she was even capable of saying she lost others."
"I said to myself she is just a journalist and she lives in England and she don't care about us," Rajmonda said. "They don't care about us, how we live, and how we die. they are coming here just to make interview for their career and for their interest."
In August, Rajmonda returned to Skenderaj with me to see her family. She hugs Qendresa, now with her hair cut short. The little girl is oblivious to the story about her death but fascinated with the photos of her soldier sister. Pictures from our encounter last winter on the mountain and pictures from long ago.
"I just wish to be again a little girl....only to be a happy child, happy kid like I was," Rajmonda said.
A happy child like Qendresa, perhaps, whose supposed murder had been the foundation of Rajmonda's story.
A story that had played around the world, and in at least a dozen countries, and each time it was told it reported Qendresa's death.
I wondered how Rajmonda's father, Aslan Rreci, feels about his daughter being used in propaganda.
"We didn't try to do any propaganda," he said. "But against the Serbs you had to fight in every way, even with propaganda like this. but this was only by accident, this wasn't a propaganda on purpose."
"I'm glad it was effective in one condition," Rajmnonda says, "if this was not my story this story belonged to someone else here."
I have reflected on the five days I spent with Shpetim Robaj in September 1998--the week before he died-- the week I first met Rajmonda.
Could he have played a part in this, like Rajmonda claims?
One afternoon he and I stood right beside the cemetary in Pristina, just a few metres from where he'd soon be buried. We watched villages burn in the distance. Kosovo was on fire but the story dominating the news was the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. To many Kosovar Albanians, it seemed the outside world had forgotten them.
Ilir Tolaj thought it had. He was Shpetim's close friend and colleague. One year ago he appealed to the West to intervene. He's never met Rajmonda - except on video tape - but he admits he's impressed with her performance.
"If this is a lie - don't know if it's small or big," he said. "Maybe from my point it's small, from the point of the journalist, it's very big and unacceptable. But if this small lie from my point of view made some kind of impact in what west country did in Kosovo then it's worth it."
The fact is that Rajmonda didn't need a story about a dead sister to explain her motivation. She was born in Drenica in the very place where 18 years later, the war would begin. The first fires of Kosovo's war were set in Prekaz, just a short walk from Rajmonda's home.
In March 1998, Serb forces launched an attack against what they called Albanian terrorists.
It was the assault which alerted the world to the Kosovo conflict.
Children were among the 53 members of the Jashari clan who died.
Rajmonda walked among the Jashari graves in a meadow.
"My best friend was in the same class," she said. "and when the Jasharis were killed...I went in Prekaz. I saw the victims and I saw her... and when I saw her, then I said to myself now it's the moment I'm gonna take the gun and I'm gonna became a member of KLA." "How do I know that's story's true?" I asked.
"Oh you will find it, it's easy," she replied.
Of course finding the truth here is not at all easy. I chose to cover the war in Kosovo by following the people I had come to know through Shpetim Robaj. It's hard for me to believe he played any witting part in perpetrating Rajmonda's lie. In fact often he corrected fellow Kosovars when they told exaggerated stories of suffering. He helped me get started on telling the story of war through the eyes of ordinary people. It was partly because of his death that I wanted to return to those he'd introduced me to. It's by returning repeatedly to Kosovo that I uncovered Rajmonda's lie. But hers is just one. How many other lies will remain buried?"
Source: http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/kosovo3/rajmonda.html (<- click)
Who wants to uphoald this NWO backed "Serbs as Killers, Muslims as Victims scenario"?
So tell me!
Karadjordje